Steve compares the (Symbian OS, S60-powered) Nokia E61 and the (Windows Mobile 5-powered) Palm Treo 750v, both with qwerty keyboards and a full office and online application set. Is the 750v a cut above the rest of the Windows Mobile competition? Find out in his latest head to head.
Read on in the full article.
The Treo 750 does not have wifi! Seems like a major difference to me. I don't use wifi myself that often with the good availability of 3G in London & surrounding areas. However, I noticed this week that The Cloud wifi is now suddenly available in a lot more places and wifi will become an important factor when choosing a device in the future, especially as VOIP apps start becoming available.
EDIT
Also noticed that Vodafone UK the Treo 750 is nearly twice the price of the Nokia E61 (contract price with the same T&Cs). That surely is a difference! So E61 with wifi is 1/2 the price of the Treo!
I had the opportunity to try out a Vodafone 750w too a few days ago. I was quite impressed, especially at some of the tweaks Palm have applied to Windows Mobile 5 which make an enormous difference. However there are still some issues with the underlying OS (and stability was apparently so-so according to the person I spoke too). I do think the 750w shows up how S60, at least in the E61, could be better optimised to the thumb keyboard style device. In some ways it is a testament to S60 flexibility / ease of use that it does as well as it does outside its home area of candy bar phone style.
I remember that Shaun's first impressions with the Treo were very bad: constant crashes, very poor signal, missed calls... And that wasn't apparently an isolated case. Has it had a firmware upgrade or did it just improve itslef with the time like good wines do?
There's another interesting head-to-head comparison here (via Shaun's blog): http://www.infosyncworld.com/reviews/n/7160.html
E62 vs T-Mobile Dash (HTC Excalibur).
Hmm.... signal/reception certainly is worse than on any of my Nokias, but I haven't had a single crash so far - rock solid!
Steve
The wifi is the big advantage of the E61. It's indeed a pitty the E61 doesn't has cameras but like blackberry, it is for business use and some companies don't allow camera phones.
But that hadn't stopped Nokia from making for example an E61i (or E63 like Steve said) with cameras for videocalling and photos/videos. But thats daydreaming...
If you want to have everything in one device you should by a HP Ipaq hw6915 but thats still really expensive
If you really want everything and I mean everything then the Loox T830 is a real bargain compared to the Treo 750
If you want to have everything in one device
Then think N95 + (day-dreaming) a small bluetouth device that would pack up the E61 keyboard, a game pad on the other side and that would run on same battery as N95 (so that you could always carry easily a spare battery).
So you take the N95 landscape mode + this magic device and you have a E61 with all additional features coming with the N95. And think about such a keyboard/game pad/remote control when your N95 is nicely connected to a widescreen TV...
Nokia, I hope you're reading 😉